Customarily, the cased motor extends sideways from the saw blade and carries a handle by which the portable saw is pushed along a worktable in cutting a workpiece. The handle is normally alongside a guard over the upper part of the saw blade.
My British Patent No. 2096942 discloses such a portable saw in which the baseplate is bodily movable on a bedplate to produce a slight angle of the saw blade relative to its direction of travel and required direction of cut in the workpiece, thus vary the width of a slot then scribed into the workpiece. Such a portable saw is particularly advantageous and economic in cutting decoratively faced boards using a first traverse in one direction with the saw blade slightly angled to scribe a slot of slightly greater width than a normal saw cut and a second traverse in the opposite direction with the saw blade unangled and lowered to cut through the board so its cut comes through the scribed slot without danger of chipping the surface at edges of the saw cut.
In even earlier arrangements, disclosed in my British Patents Nos. GB 2059338 and GB 2071009, variation in the angle of the saw blade relative to the direction of travel/cut of the saw is achieved by pivoting of mounting brackets for the saw motor relative to the baseplate so that the angle of the saw blade relative to the baseplate is varied. The saw in GB 2096942 (mentioned above) required relative movement of two plates achieved by cam means at one side of those plates; it also had an arm movable manually at the same side of those plates for setting the depth of a scribing cut and for permitting transitions from scribing to fuller depth of cut. It has no provision for making bevel cuts.